Pages tagged “sitges”

[Above: Lina Leandersson in Let the Right One In]

Another 10 days at the world’s leading festival for fantastic cinema have come to a close. All the extraterrestrials have phoned home. And the zombies are in repose until next October. Despite very late nights drinking with actors, filmmakers, distributors and programmers from Finland, Colombia, Korea, Japan, Ireland, Australia, France, Canada, New York and, of course, Spain, I managed to see 23 or 25 or 27 movies, often sleeping on my feet, so that the whole experience began to feel like an endless reel.

[Above: William Burroughs and Andy Warhol in Chelsea on the Rocks]

Within the “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere” mythology of New York City, the Chelsea Hotel has always held a unique spot as a haven for misfits, bohemians and vagabond geniuses. Even as the rest of Manhattan gentrified and Disneyfied, the 12-story building at 222 East 23rd Street—a hotel since 1905—held its ground, its rooms occupied by everyone from Dylan Thomas to Bob Dylan, Sid Vicious to Julian Schnabel, Arthur Miller to Courtney Love. It’s a cultural landmark of the feverish demimonde that has made the city what it is. Or was. Not so long ago, Stanley Bard, who had managed the hotel for 45 years, was ousted, in favor of corporate interests that may succeed in turning the hotel into a boutique enterprise.

All that is mondo melts into Sitges. Brain-eating zombies! Samurai assassins! Spooky children with spookier smiles! Post-apocalyptic clones! Robot monsters! Naked babes! Dead naked babes! Dead naked babes that bite!

[Above: Los Cronocrímenes]

Nacho Vigalondo, the director of the Spanish sci-fi caper Los Cronocrímenes (aka Timecrimes), had taken the stage at the Route 66 nightclub – a party hub situated on a street known as Disco Alley in this Catalonian resort town. His movie, a clever mystery about time travel and multiple identities, was a crowdpleaser at its big public screening that evening. And it was time for the young filmmaker to show that this was no coincidence.

Already possessed of an cerveza-fueled enthusiasm, Vigalondo hopped up with the band that was headlining the afterhours bash, and began belting into the microphone, as two black-haired vamps sandwiched him between their gyrating hips. He was singing something in Spanish, something very urgent and apparently very, very funny. Between verses, he saluted the crowd with mock-fascist gestures. Everyone pogoed like it was 1977. But what was Vigalondo telling us?

"Oh," a Spanish-speaking festival-goer told me. "He's singing, 'My penis smells like the cinema.'" A-ha! Truth be told, after a week of rolling around Sitges, from the parties that ended a little shy of daybreak to the daily marathon screenings that began just a couple of hours later, to reek merely of celluloid was a good thing. Although Cronocrímenes got passed over by the prize juries, it was one of several strong entries from France and Spain that made this year a thrilling one at Sitges.

The film's plot emulates classic pulp science fiction, redolent of Alfred Bester or Philip K. Dick, as a middle-aged man finds his quiet afternoon disturbed by an intruder. Soon, he begins stalking, and being stalked by, a mysterious figure whose face is disguised in pink medical gauze. There's also a naked girl involved, and a research scientist (Vigalondo) in an adjacent office park who happens to be testing out a new time machine. The bogeyman is an homage to James Whale's 1933 film, The Invisible Man, but his identity doesn't stay secret for long. Watching the Chinese Box-like narrative unravel is the whole point, and Vigalondo choreographs the action with a suspenseful touch that nods subtly towards the surrealist prankery of a Luis Bunuel, who once sat on a Sitges jury.

This year's judges were moved by The Fall, voting it best film. Tarsem Singh, best-known as a rock-video auteur whose "Losing My Religion" clip helped speed R.E.M. to early-'90s glory, shot epic vistas in something like 37 countries for this old-school epic. He conjures a cross between the mystical tableaux of Jodoworsky's The Holy Mountain and the make-believe whimsy of Terry Gilliam (in his nicer moments). The premise sounds like a good novel: in the 1920s, a severely injured Hollywood stuntman befriends a little girl recuperating in the same hospital. He tells her a grandiose fable about a noble band of thieves, and in exchange she steals morphine for him, as the actor intends to kill himself over a heartbreak. But for a movie about storytelling the actual story is pretty weak, wholly overwhelmed by the costumes, design and cinematography. Fall Asleep might be a more fitting title.

That was impossible during Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django. The Japanese cult director takes a step back from the nerve-wrattling violence and psychological torture of Auditon and Ichi the Killer to rewire the Western genre. Think Deadwood gone otaku. The gunslinging saga, with dialogue spoken in perversely (and haltingly) phonetic English, scored much-deserved awards for cinematography and design, and boasted the festival's inevitable Quentin Tarantino cameo.

The real story of Sitges 07, however, was the fierce comeback of the zombie movie. As if the undead ever really go away. Although likely Oscar contender The Orphanage got much of the spotlight, it was the scrappy [REC], by directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, that stole the festival, copping the prize for best direction, among several others. Much as zombie-daddy George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, the scenes are shot from the point-of-view of a first-person video camera. The set-up? A Spanish reality show hostess is following local firemen on the nightly rounds, which leads them to an apartment building whose residents – we are soon to learn – are afflicted with a strange virus. What happens next is pure Zombie 101, given a severe jolt of new voltage thanks to imaginative rigging of familiar spookhouse dynamics, Almodovarian spoofery of media absurdity, and the shaky veracity of that hand-held cam.

How scary is it? The film's crew secretly taped the audience during one of [REC]'s screenings. Check it out.

There was much banter about the possibility of a Hollywood remake of [REC], much in the way that so many Asian horror flicks have been adapted (and, mostly, ruined) for American audiences. Hopefully, the festival buzz will win the film at least a short domestic theatrical run before that. The zombies demand it.

Zombies galore, French neo-Nazi cannibals, sukiyaki gunslingers, lovelorn Michael Jackson impersonators, the return of Robert Englund and...an Ingmar Bergman tribute? It's all in a week's fun at Sitges 07. The sprawling 11-day marathon is more formally known as the Festival Internacional de Cinema de Catalunya. Oct. 4-14 marked the 40th anniversary of the event, staged in Sitges, Spain, the lovely Catalonian beach resort about 30 minutes south of Barcelona. Fans, critics, movie programmers and filmmakers streamed in from around the world to revel in every screaming mutant variation of the catch-all category known as fantastic cinema.

"Europeans are not snobbish about this stuff," says Stuart Gordon, the American director who first achieved cult status with his giddy, gross-out 1980s adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft stories, Re-Animator and From Beyond. Gordon was back for the fourth time, as the festival presented his latest low-budget shocker, Stuck. The film, based on a true story, ponders the existential dilemma of a homeless man (Stephen Rea) who finds himself wedged in a car windshield after a nurse (Mena Suvari) recklessly smacks into him and hides both vehicle and victim in her garage.

"Sitges is the Olympics of horror movies," Gordon continues. He was sitting in the lobby bar of the Hotel Melia, the hilltop headquarters for the festival, and his bold, Hawaiian-style shirt was ideal for the palm trees and pool nearby. "The first time I came here I was on the prize jury, and two of the films in competition were Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Peter Jackson's Brain Dead. And I got to meet both of those guys. It really brings filmmakers together, and you get to see films you'd never see anywhere else."

There was plenty of marquee and arthouse appeal. You could catch an early glimpse of new work from Olivier Assayas, Park Chan-wook, Brian DePalma, Johnny To, Harmony Korine, and even Woody Allen. But where the fest really gets its ya-yas is from screening arcana from every corner of the celluloid planet – whether it's 1980s soft-porn about Christ-obsessed Filipino lesbians or a retrospective devoted to the drive-in mayhem of director Enzo Castellari. Castellari, a former boxer with the build and bearing of an Italian Popeye, has long been a favorite of Tarantino, who is remaking his World War II epic Inglorious Bastards. The younger director has a cameo in Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django, a crowd-pleasing otaku take-off on Sergio Leone, while his Grindhouse got a fancy Southern European launch here, represented by the lively New Zealand stuntwoman-turned-actress Zoe Bell. Rather than any specific detail, though, what makes the festival unique is the way it unabashedly fetishizes the same kind of genre obsession that drives filmmakers like Tarantino.

"Something that North American fans and even filmmakers don't know is that there is a huge science-fiction and fantasy film circuit," says Colin Geddes, who programs the Midnight Madness series at the Toronto International Film Festival. "And on that circuit, Sitges is considered the equivalent of the Cannes Film Festival. Just the fact that it's celebrating its 40th anniversary is proof of it."